Sony kills (for now, at least) UMD transfer program for PSP Go

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Oh, Sony. You’re so close to being back, and then this happens. As you all know, the PSP Go comes out next week, and judging by all the random unboxings I’ve seen on various message boards—maybe CrunchGear’s PSP Go got lost in the mail? It’s not like we haven’t been writing about the bloody thing for ages now, lol!—it looks like a fine, fine piece of hardware. The kicker, though, is: what happens to all those UMD games we’ve bought over the years? The original plan was to have some sort of trade-in or transfer program, whereby for every UMD you bought, you’d get a code to download the game. (Remember, there’s no UMD slot in the PSP Go, so all games have to be downloaded onto the device’s memory.) Turns out there’s a small glitch.

Sony told Kotaku that it cannot move forward with the trade-in program because of “legal and technical reasons.” So if you buy a PSP Go the day it comes out, then you won’t be able to trade-in, say, Soulcalibur, for a downloadable code or whatever. That’s bad, yes.

Now, that isn’t to say that your UMDs are, henceforth, totally useless, it’s just that Sony couldn’t figure everything out in time for the system’s launch. Maybe in the future everything will be A-OK, but for the time being, yeah, we’re boned.

Sony says that, once all the Is are dotted and Ts crossed, it’ll announce what’s up. I just hope, for Sony’s sake, that it figures something out that’s not altogether a slap in the face to the people who’ve bought UMDs over the years. That’s not a way to keep these people’s business.

I just want to see Sony’s swagger back, for the good of the industry as a whole. Screwing up the PSP Go’s launch is not conducive to swagger-getting.